A new season

It's June 1, a new month, the start of winter, and time for new things. But there are still a few loose ends I'd like to tie up.

Last month was a sort of experiment—and a busy one. One thing I assumed—or maybe hoped—is that I might get a bit of a "buffer" of posts to help me make my goal of an average of one post per day. With a rough start to the year, I was behind as May began, and I thought I'd catch up.

I certainly did catch up: I published 52 posts in May, which wiped out my "deficit". However, despite that, I ended up only nine posts ahead, and I'm certain to miss more than nine posts in the second half of the year, so I'm not off the hook yet.

All that aside (especially because numbers and averages don't actually matter…), May was an experiment in endurance as much as anything else. I wondered if I could endure through the month. I did—much to my surprise.

When I wound up my New Zealand Music Month series, I said that if I'd planned the series I'd have organised it better. What I really meant was that I'd have had a logical progression through the posts. I worked that out part way through, and I started thematically linking a post to the one before. If I'd planned it out, the whole thing would have been a logical progression.

Or, more likely, it wouldn't. I don't take well to planning blog posts: If I did, I'd be more like Roger Green and plan at least some posts in advance. But, I never do, so there's no reason to think planning my May posts would actually have happened.

Despite all that, and the worry that I might not finish, I did. Yes, some posts were better than others, and I included some posts that, if I'd planned, I might not have—and I also skipped over some that I wish I had included. The thing is, this is always the case, even when I have no themed month.

So, in the end, even a post-a-day themed month isn't really that different from the usual free-for-all in a typical month. That was the thing I learned that surprised me the most.

Now it's a new month, and time to get back to normal blogging. Fortunately, I have a lot of things to talk about, most of them not in any way themed.